AVAILABILITY

Perl is available for most operating systems, including virtually all
Unix-like platforms. See "Supported Platforms" in perlport for a
listing.

ENVIRONMENT

See perlrun.

AUTHOR

Larry Wall <larry@wall.org>, with the help of oodles of other folks.
If your Perl success stories and testimonials may be of help to others
who wish to advocate the use of Perl in their applications, or if you
wish to simply express your gratitude to Larry and the Perl developers,
please write to perl-thanks@perl.org .

DIAGNOSTICS

The "use warnings" pragma (and the -w switch) produces some lovely
diagnostics.
See perldiag for explanations of all Perlâ€™s diagnostics. The "use
diagnostics" pragma automatically turns Perlâ€™s normally terse warnings
and errors into these longer forms.
Compilation errors will tell you the line number of the error, with an
indication of the next token or token type that was to be examined.
(In a script passed to Perl via -e switches, each -e is counted as one
line.)
Setuid scripts have additional constraints that can produce error
messages such as "Insecure dependency". See perlsec.
Did we mention that you should definitely consider using the -w switch?

BUGS

The -w switch is not mandatory.
Perl is at the mercy of your machineâ€™s definitions of various
operations such as type casting, atof(), and floating-point output with
sprintf().
If your stdio requires a seek or eof between reads and writes on a
particular stream, so does Perl. (This doesnâ€™t apply to sysread() and
syswrite().)
While none of the built-in data types have any arbitrary size limits
(apart from memory size), there are still a few arbitrary limits: a
given variable name may not be longer than 251 characters. Line
numbers displayed by diagnostics are internally stored as short
integers, so they are limited to a maximum of 65535 (higher numbers
usually being affected by wraparound).
You may mail your bug reports (be sure to include full configuration
information as output by the myconfig program in the perl source tree,
or by "perl -V") to perlbug@perl.org . If youâ€™ve succeeded in
compiling perl, the perlbug script in the utils/ subdirectory can be
used to help mail in a bug report.
Perl actually stands for Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister, but
donâ€™t tell anyone I said that.

NOTES

The Perl motto is "Thereâ€™s more than one way to do it." Divining how
many more is left as an exercise to the reader.
The three principal virtues of a programmer are Laziness, Impatience,
and Hubris. See the Camel Book for why.